You must accept that you are never going to come close to teaching your students anything more than a fraction of the language, in spite of what the College Board would have you believe to keep rapidly burning-out teachers all over the country contributing to their coffers in the form of the AP Exam and other standardized testing programs that drive the imbalanced educational system in place in the U.S. today.
You can never clarify things that you say in the TL enough; you can never speak slowly enough; you can never relax enough in the stress cauldrons that our buildings are and have always been, because your students will never hear enough language – not through any fault of your own – in order for them to be fully prepared for those standardized exams.
Even by October of any year, they may have only realistically heard the language in your classroom for a total of about twenty hours, and that’s if you’ve been staying in the TL for a large part of each class period.
Keep in mind that, for modern languages, 10,000 hours of exposure are suggested by the research as necessary for mastery, whatever that term means, and with only 20 hours in level one by October, your students will have heard the language only 0.002 (two thousandths) of the time needed, literally a fraction of what the research suggests.
(For those instructors of Mandarin Chinese, the figure at 24,000 hours is more than double the 10,000 hours required for modern languages. From this we deduce that we and especially Mandarin teachers clearly can do little more in our programs than simply try to get our students to want to continue on in the future with the language.
So why, like the Tarot fool who strides with such confidence over dangerous cliffs, would you ever stress yourself out to such an absurd degree, trying to do something that no human being could possibly do – achieve some kind of score on some kind of test that claims (inaccurately) to measure what children have learned in your classroom?
Reset your mind. Get the kids interested by building their confidence in themselves as language learners. Do what you can. Don’t try to do what you can’t. For that to happen, you are going to have to learn how to relax when in the building, and that requires the right pedagogy.